VOA director Michael Abramowitz said, ‘for the first time in 83 years, the storied Voice of America is being silenced.’
About 1,300 journalists, producers, and assistants at the federally funded Voice of America (VOA) news organization were placed on administrative leave, said VOA director Michael Abramowitz in a post on LinkedIn on Saturday.
“For the first time in 83 years, the storied Voice of America is being silenced,” Abramowitz wrote.
At the same time, Kari Lake, nominee to head up VOA and a special adviser at its parent agency, said VOA is “not salvageable.”
Parent agency, the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), also terminated grants to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which broadcasts to countries in Eastern Europe, including Russia and Ukraine, as well as to Radio Free Asia, which broadcasts to China and North Korea.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on March 14 instructing USAGM and six other little-known agencies to reduce their operations to the minimum mandated by statute, saying it was necessary to shrink bureaucracy.
Abramovitz called VOA “a priceless asset” for the United States. He said it is “playing an essential role in the fight against communism, fascism, and oppression, and in the fight for freedom and democracy around the world.”
He said VOA currently reaches more than 360 million people in 48 languages each week.
On VOA’s website homepage, the lead story is dated March 15 and most of the other top stories were published either on March 14 or March 15, according to an Epoch Times review of the website.
Lake said in a statement that the USAGM is a “giant rot and burden to the American taxpayer” and is “not salvageable.”
Lake, a former news anchor, said in her statement that she recommends shrinking the agency to the smallest possible size under federal law.
“While there are bright spots within the agency with personnel who are talented and dedicated public servants, this is the exception rather than the rule. It is unfortunate that the work that was done by self-interested insiders in coordination with outside activist groups and radical Leftist advocacy organizations to ‘Trump-Proof’ the agency made it impossible to reform,” her statement added.
Those agencies, she also said, were “spending taxpayer money to create false narratives” and “were amplified by biased media counterparts with clear conflicts of interest at the Washington Post, NPR, and more, to actively cover up their obscene waste, fraud, and abuse.”
Several weeks ago, Lake said she did not want VOA to become “Trump TV” but that she doesn’t want it to mirror the coverage seen on news outlets such as CNN, CBS, and MSNBC.
“We are fighting an information war, and there’s no better weapon than the truth, and I believe the VOA can be that weapon,” she said on Feb. 21 at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
President Donald Trump has named Brent Bozell to lead USAGM, pending Senate confirmation.
Reuters contributed to this report.